


the sky will come for you once

by nirav



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 07:32:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12076446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: kara zor-el, in her first 61 days on earth





	the sky will come for you once

_only want to get to work_   
_but every morning i'm too sick to drive_   
_suffering whiteout conditions_   
_forget the mission, just get out alive_

It’s been four days since Kal-- her cousin-- _Clark_ \-- had flown Kara to a house near water and left her there with a family of strangers.

Four days, and she’s fully adjusted to the sound of their language if not the way every sound is amplified; she’s acclimated to the overly bright and clean sunlight, if not the way her limbs are overwhelmed with a burning, powerful energy that simmers under her skin and pushes and pushes and pushes to be released.  Eliza and Jeremiah are kind and gentle, keeping their distance until she’s ready to come to them; their daughter-- barely taller than Kara, with limbs she’s still growing into and hasn't’ figured out where to put, just like Kara moving uncomfortably around the unbelievable strength swallowing her muscles-- avoids Kara at every turn.  

It’s the middle of the night and Kara’s been awake for hours, laying frozen on the bed with her eyes screwed shut and hands clapped over her ears.  It’s the first night she’s tried sleeping in a bed instead of a bathtub, floating uneasily with water covering her ears and swallowing the sounds around her.  The house is quiet, ostensibly, but plumbing creaks and the waves rumble outside and the air conditioner hums a soft undercurrent to it all, and every breaking wave and grumbling pipe is _too much_.  She already destroyed a pillow trying to block her ears a day ago-- Alex had rolled her eyes the following morning, Eliza’s mouth tight behind her smile when she promised Kara it was fine-- and she clamps her arms around her head to avoid tearing another pillow apart.  

Kara wants to go home, but home is gone and all she has left is a cousin she failed, grown and gone off to his own life, and a collection of aliens surrounding her.  

The empty weight in her stomach, the one that’s twisted around itself since she woke up to Kal--Clark-- opening her pod, creeps further up into her chest at the thought of home, how the sky had looked rushing towards her as she flew offworld, red and dark and falling, is almost enough to dull the edges of the sounds surrounding her.  It hurts, her chest aching with every breath, the oxygen richer and warmer here, her heart pushing against her sternum with more power than it ever had before, but it hurts in a way that distracts from the avalanche of sound or the fact that her vision blurs between magnifying Eliza’s pores and seeing right through Alex’s shoes to where her toes are constantly tapping nervously.  

It would be more poetic, probably, more aligned with the elegant literature she’d read growing up, if the physical pain was her distraction from the flashes of memory, the empty spaces where her family had once been, the black hole where her planet had existed once.  But there’s no room for poetry anymore, and her head aches with every whisper, so Kara sinks into her grief instead.

* * *

 

It’s been ten days, and Kara can sometimes sleep through the night now.  She hasn’t destroyed a pillow again, though she’s pulled three doors off of their hinges and curled around herself in shame as Eliza, always kind but so tired, reattached them every time.

The sun will be up soon, and Kara’s been awake for an hour.  Her breaths are even, her eyes closed, her feet floating off the floor as she counts on every exhale and times them against her slowing heartbeat.  The sounds of the house and the waves and the wind outside are still so much, but she’s adjusting.

A door opens across the hall and it jars Kara from her focus; she drops down onto the floor with a thud and scrambles to keep from falling over.  One hand catches on the corner of the bedside table and the wood snaps off quietly in her hand.  

The door closes and Kara squints, shaking her head until she can see through the closed door to where Alex is tiptoeing down the hallway and down the stairs towards the kitchen.  Kara shakes wood splinters from her hands and shuffles after Alex, half walking and half floating down the stairs, in part because she can _fly_ on this planet and it’s too surreal to ignore, but mostly because she nearly broke through the stairwell two days earlier and that would almost certainly be harder for Eliza to replace.

She floats around the corner into the kitchen, hovering by the doorway and hesitating because Alex’s back is to her, the fridge open, and she’s chugging orange juice.

“Hi,” Kara says hesitantly.  She’s adjusted to the language, English coming easily, but the words are still foreign and heavy, forming unevenly on her tongue.  Her voice is soft, even to her own ears, but it’s enough for Alex to choke on the orange juice and spin around, spitting juice out halfway across the kitchen.

“What are you _doing_?” Alex snaps, halfway a yell and halfway a whisper, one hand shaking and wiping at the juice on her chin.

“I’m sorry,” Kara mumbles.  “I didn’t-- no one else is awake--”

“No kidding.”  Alex rolls her eyes and shoves the orange juice back into the fridge.  She tosses a roll of paper towels to Kara.  “Help me clean this up.”

“I’m sorry,” Kara says again.  The roll creases in her hands, but she manages to keep from tearing right through it and kneels to wipe up juice from the floor.  “What are you--”

“Nothing,” Alex says sharply.  She crumples up the wet paper towels in her hands and yanks Kara’s from her, shoving them roughly into the trash can.  Kara watches from her spot kneeling on the floor, hands folded loosely in front of her.  A flash of orange under the table catches her eye, duller and darker than the juice, and she reaches for it on autopilot.  

“What is--” She starts to say, cradling the small container with the white lid carefully in both hands; she’s cut off when Alex nearly falls over herself lunging to grab it from Kara.

“Don’t-- that’s mine!”

“Sorry,” Kara says again, shrinking back.  “I didn’t mean to-- what--”

Alex shoves the bottle into her sweatpants pocket, yanking a hand through her hair.  Her heart is beating too fast to only be driven by anger, her eyes wide and dark, and Kara blinks up at her, taking in the fear driving Alex’s pulse up.

“You’re afraid of me,” Kara says quietly.  Of course Alex is afraid of the alien in her home, ripping doors apart and listening to her heartbeat and--

“What?” It’s enough for Alex to pause, and she sucks in a deep breath, so loud Kara’s head aches.  “No, I’m not-- I mean, yeah, you could like break me in half if you wanted, but I’m not-- I don’t think you _would_.”

“Then why is your pulse--”

“It’s not you,” Alex says, all sharp edges and brittle lines in her voice, arms wrapped around herself and hands curled around her own elbows.  She paces back and forth in front of Kara for long seconds before pulling in another breath and sitting down on the floor in front of Kara.  She pulls the bottle out of her pocket and offers it back to Kara.  “It’s me.”

“What is it?” Kara blinks down at the bottle, orange with a white cap and a white label, Alex’s name printed across it and a collection of scientific names Kara doesn’t recognize because she’s learned this language in a week but she doesn’t _know_ it, and she screws her eyes shut and offers the bottle back to Alex hurriedly.

“It’s medicine,” Alex says after a moment.

Kara’s eyes snap open.  “Are you sick?”  

“No, no, I’m not--” Alex pauses and rubs at her eyes.  “Kinda.  It’s complicated.”  She looks down at her hands, one thumb tracing the edge of the bottle’s label.  “They’re anti-depressants.”

Kara’s mouth opens and then shuts, brow creasing and uncertain as she tries to scroll through her understanding of the English language to parse through the phrase.

“It’s--” Alex starts.  She shrugs and drops the bottle on the floor.  “Depression.  It’s for treating depression.”  She sighs when Kara just blinks at her.  “You know, when people are just-- sad.  And tired.  Sad, and tired, and don’t want to get out of  bed sometimes.”

“Why are you--”

“It’s a brain chemistry thing,” Alex says quickly.  “I didn’t-- nothing _happened_.  Some people just have a thing where their brains don’t-- it makes them depressed, sometimes.  The pills help.”

“Oh,” Kara says, looking uncertainly down at the pill bottle and then back up to Alex.  “Pills can make you happy?”

Alex laughs, short and sharp, and it’s the first time she’s smiled around Kara ever.  “I mean, some can,  I guess, but those are mostly illegal.”  She shrugs.  “Some people are depressed because of things around them, and some people are depressed because their brains aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do with serotonin.  The pills can help balance things out, more or less.”

“Oh,” Kara says again.  She shifts to mirror Alex’s posture, crossing her legs in front of her and folding her hands in her lap.  “Do you-- would they help me?”

Alex’s smile fades away, her mouth turning down in a way it hadn’t since Kara arrived.  It’s not a frown of irritation or annoyance,  but simple sadness, and it lances into Kara’s chest far more painfully than the way Alex had snapped angrily at her earlier.  “I don’t think so,” she says quietly.  “I’m sorry.  Even if you weren’t..um…”

“An alien?” Kara says.  She smiles, as best she can, because she’s an alien on this world.  She has to stop thinking of Alex and Eliza and everyone else as the aliens.  

“Yeah.”  Alex pulls at the hem of her shirt, looking away from Kara.  “I don’t think your brain chemistry is the same.  But also what happened to you--”

“I know,” Kara mumbles.  She takes a deep breath of her own.  “Why are you taking them in the middle of the night?”

Alex’s shoulders fold in on themselves, and Kara clenches her hands together because they may be from two different worlds and species but the body language is the same and Alex needs something to hold onto, but Kara could snap her spine if she hugs too tightly.  She winds her fingers together and grips, hard enough to hurt, and shoves her hands harder into her lap to keep from reaching out.

“Dad doesn’t know,” Alex says, barely above a whisper.  “Mom promised she wouldn’t tell anyone if I didn’t want her to and Dad would just want to help and I just-- don’t want him to know.”  She looks back up at Kara, eyes wide and jaw tight.  “You can’t tell him.”

There’s something sturdy under her words, stronger than anything Kara’s found on this planet, solid and familiar like the gravity back home and the power her mother wielded, and she nods quickly.  “I won’t tell him.  Promise.”

“Okay,” Alex says after a long moment.  She nods, sharp, sure, and pushes up to her feet, holds a hand out to Kara.

Kara shrinks back, shaking her head and moving to push herself up carefully.  Alex rolls her eyes and shakes her hand in front of Kara’s face insistently.

“Don’t be rude,” she says, half exasperation and half gentle, and leans down to grab at Kara’s hand.  Her fingers tighten around Kara’s palm, even as Kara’s lay limp in hers, and she pulls until Kara scrambles up to stand in front of her and tries desperately keeps her fingers still and loose.  She could crush every bone in Alex’s hand with no effort, just like the doorknob she’d crumpled into nothing yesterday, except it’s _Alex_ and a hand can’t be replaced like a doorknob, not on this planet--

“You can’t just never touch people,” Alex says, folding her arms over her chest.  “You gotta figure it out.”

“I know,” Kara mumbles.  “I’m trying, I just don’t want to--”

“Gotta start somewhere,” Alex says with a shrug.  She hooks her hand through Kara’s elbow and tugs.  It’s not enough to make Kara move, not nearly enough, but Kara turns with Alex anyways, stepping carefully on the floorboards and up the stairs.  Alex pulls up to a stop in front of Kara’s room and nods towards the open door.  “See?  You didn’t break that door.”

“Right,” Kara says.  She inhales carefully and pulls her arm free.  “Thank you.”

Alex shrugs and shoves her hands into her sweatpants pockets.  “No problem.”  She shrugs again and heads down towards the end of the hall, disappearing into her bedroom.  Even the gentle click of her door shutting is thunderous, but Kara lets the sound roll over her and barely winces.  She takes another deep breath and disappears into her room.

* * *

 

It’s been eighteen days, and Kara starts school.

It’s loud and busy and she grips as tight as she dares to the straps of the bag Eliza had bought her, shrinks down into her shoulders, turns her hearing in  her own heartbeat.  It’s not enough to block out the weight of the one recognizable voice in the cacophony, Alex’s fluster and frustration as she speaks to some boy sideswiping Kara heavily.

It’s been eighteen days and she knows Alex doesn’t hate her, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like it, sometimes.

By the end of the day she’s broken the padlock on her locker, broken all of her pencils, and accidentally pulled the bathroom door off its hinges, though thankfully in the middle of fourth period so no one was there to witness it.  She’s almost stopped jumping at the sound of the bell that rings between classes and has more or less successfully slumped through each of her classes without drawing too much attention to herself.  

“We’re going to the beach,” Alex informs her when they meet at the end of the day.  Kara blinks at her and casts a glance over at the line of school buses, noisy and bright in the sunlight, and Alex rolls her eyes and hooks a hand around Kara’s forearm.  “Bobby’s brother is going to drive us.”

“I thought--”  Kara stumbles along after Alex, shoulders hunched down carefully and feet hurrying to keep up the appearance of human weakness as she’s pulled along.  An ache has been growing between her shoulder blades since lunchtime from holding herself so carefully and forcing so light a touch on everything she comes into contact with.

“Mom won’t be home for hours anyways,” Alex says with a shrug.  She pauses halfway over and takes a deep breath, turning to face Kara with her chin up.  “You said you liked the sound of the waves.  We’ll be right next to them, okay?  It’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” Kara mumbles.  She wraps her fingers around each other and nods and follows Alex to the car.

An hour later, a car crashes.  An hour later, Kara saves a child’s life.  An hour later, the brand new clothes Eliza had bought her are covered in grease and soot, and her ears are still ringing from the sound of an explosion, and Alex is in the hospital because Kara couldn’t get to her in time.

It’s been eighteen days since Kara left Krypton on the promise to care for her cousin and she hasn’t just failed at that, she’s gone ahead and landed her adoptive family’s daughter in the hospital.

* * *

 

It’s been nineteen days and the glasses are heavy.  They aren’t actually _heavy_ , not in an actual sense, but their presence weighs heavily across the bridge of her nose, dragging down her spine as she shuffles out of her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon to find a snack.  Alex hasn’t left her room since she got back from the hospital, and Eliza’s been sequestered in her office for hours.

The kitchen is occupied.  Alex is standing in front of the open refrigerator, one arm cradled to her chest as she squints into the fridge.  

“Oh,” Kara says quietly, holding back in the doorway to the hall.  She hasn’t seen Alex since the ambulance arrived, since Eliza swept her away, since Jeremiah presented her with glasses and told her to keep her powers hidden.  “I’m sorry--”

“It’s okay.”  Alex doesn’t turn around, but the sound bounces off of the hard edges of the refrigerator.  “You don’t have to go.”

“Oh,” Kara says again.  “Okay.”  She pulls at her fingers and bites at her lip and pushes self-consciously at her new glasses, uncertain and afraid, until Alex finally sighs and turns around.  Her arm is in a cast and there are bruises reaching across one cheekbone and up past her eye.  Kara shrinks back towards the hall, and Alex, inexplicably, smiles.  

“Looks worse than it is,” she says.  She smiles a little wider and shrugs her free shoulder and turns back to the fridge.  “Not as bad as the fact that we have, like, _no_ good food here.”

“There’s--” Kara cuts herself off, flipping through her new vocabulary as quickly as she can, trying to find the words for the food Eliza had brought her yesterday when she couldn’t stop shaking.  “The--”

“Pie?” Alex supplies.  She points at the covered apple pie in the friday and raises one eyebrow.  It pulls at the bruising on her face, but she smiles again, and Kara stops wringing her fingers.  

“Pie,” she echoes.  “Yes.”

“Apple is overrated,” Alex says, flapping her good hand dismissively at the dish.  “Wait til you try chocolate.  Besides, I want salty.”

“Salty?”

Alex shoots another look back at her.  “Aren’t you guys supposed to have superior brains or something?”  She shuts the fridge with a definitive thud and points at the cabinet to the left.  “Can you--”

“Yes!” Kara says, bounding across the kitchen, a brief moment to uncoil all of the energy built up in her limbs.  She misjudges and bumps into the counter edge, but it doesn’t hurt and nothing breaks this time, and she grins broadly.  “What do you need?”

Alex shoves her way, gently, between Kara and the fridge, propping her injured arm on the counter and pointing with the uninjured one.  “That.”

Kara eyes the machine hesitantly for a moment, uncertainty heavy in her chest, before reaching up to carefully extract it.  She holds it delicately in her palms, eyes wide and jaw tight, determined not to crush it.  She settles it softly onto the counter and turns to Alex with a triumphant smile.

Alex rolls her eyes but smiles in spite of herself anyways, poking at Kara’s arm until she moves out of the way.  

“What is it?” Kara peers over Alex’s shoulder as she dumps something-- pebbles?-- into the machine and plugs it into the wall.  

“You’ll see, “Alex says loftily, spinning around to face Kara with a grin that could only be described as predatory.  Kara’s barely found the words to form a question when Alex blindly hits a switch on the machine and a devastatingly loud crack sounds from it, and another, and another, rapid-fire and too loud.  Kara stumbles back with a yell, hands clapped over her ears, and dives for cover under the kitchen table.

Alex’s laughter pierces through her hands and Kara opens one eye to see Alex doubled over, laughing hard enough that her uninjured hand is pressed against her ribcage.

“Oh my God,” she gasps out, pointing at Kara and laughing more.  “So worth it.  Oh my God.”

The cracking continues on, and Kara pulls her hands away slowly, wincing at the pops and cracks coming from the machine.  “What is it?”

“Popcorn machine,” Alex says, wiping at her eyes.  “That worked out so much better than I thought.”

“What?”  Kara scoots out from under the table, arms wrapped around her knees tightly.  

“I didn’t know what you’d do, but hiding under the table was definitely not what I thought,” Alex says around a grin.  She nudges at Kara’s foot with one of hers until Kara scoots over, making room for Alex to take a seat under the table with her, still chuckling.  “We’re even.”

“What?” Kara says again.

“Payback,” Alex says with a shrug.  “So you can stop feeling guilty about my arm.”

“Oh,” Kara says slowly.  “Oh.”

“Also, I really do want popcorn,” Alex says.  “You’ll like it.”

“Popcorn,” Kara says slowly, sounding her way through the syllables.  “Is it better than pie?”

“Guess you’re about to find out,” Alex says, elbowing her in the side.  It’s enough to get a smile out of Kara, and she unwinds from around her knees, crosses her legs like Alex has, tucks her hands into her lap.  She watches the popcorn machine work from their spot under the kitchen table, listening to Alex ramble on about heat and corn and the science of it all.  

It’s been nineteen days and, for a moment, short and fleeting and buried in the sound of popcorn popping and Alex talking, Earth feels just a little bit like it could be home.

* * *

 

Six weeks pass and Alex’s cast comes off.  She walks into Kara’s room without knocking and Kara snaps a pencil in half, smudging her homework.  She’s only been going to school maybe three days a week, the noise too much, the stares even worse; the first day had been nothing compared to the first time back after the accident and the way people stared at her like they _knew_.  Eliza and Jeremiah had given her an out, letting her ease into it, and Kara had leapt at the opportunity.

She’s been here long enough to know that anyone can break a pencil.  For only the third time since she arrived here, the petulant _crack_ of wood snapping doesn’t make her jump, and she forces a grin up at Alex.  She doesn’t have to force herself to smile as much anymore, a quiet comfort settling over time between herself and Alex, but it’s too hard, some days, to focus on anything but how it feels like she’s forgetting her father’s voice.  

Today she’d stayed home because she woke up from a nightmare of the sky on Krypton ripping apart and falling towards the launch bay she had taken off from, leaving her parents to die, and burnt a hole in the ceiling.

“You’re going to wrap my wrist,” Alex informs her, settling onto the bed.  She tosses a rolled up Ace bandage at Kara, who catches it without thinking, and shoves her wet hair back over her shoulder with her good arm.

“I don’t think--” Kara starts to say, glancing up at the plastic sheeting covering the hole above her bed.

“You’re not gonna break me,” Alex says, rolling her eyes.  “You haven’t broken a door in a _month_.”

“Okay,” Kara mumbles.  She sits, gentle and careful, at Alex’s side and accepts the wrist Alex presents to her.  Her skin is pale, paler than the rest of Alex, the joint even more feeble than Alex’s other delicate wrist.  Kara’s fingers shake, forearms cramping with the effort of keeping her touch light as she winds the bandage around Alex’s wrist.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Alex says halfway through the painstakingly slow process, after Kara’s uncertain hands have dropped the bandage twice, after she’s had to restart once because she forgot to support Alex’s thumb.

“Right,” Kara says, nose wrinkling with effort.

“You’re doing great, you know,” Alex says after a moment, and Kara nearly drops the bandage again because there’s weight to her words, and Alex’s heartbeat shifted as she spoke.  She doesn’t look up to meet Kara’s eyes, focusing on her hand instead, pulse increasing and breathing deepening.  She’s not talking about her wrist, or the bandage, and Kara bites the inside of her cheek, sucks in a deep breath, keep working at the bandage.  

“The doctor I see,” Alex says after a long silence.  She taps a finger from her free hand against her temple.  “About this, not about my arm.”

Kara freezes, just for a moment, because Alex hasn’t said a word about the anti-depressants since Kara walked in on her in the kitchen the first time.  She’s taken to bringing a snack up to Kara’s room when she takes them, splitting bowls of ice cream late at night after Jeremiah and Eliza have gone to sleep, because Kara doesn’t need much in the way of sleep and it’s the only time Alex can take them without catching her dad’s attention.  

“Sometimes the depression thing, it’s a lot,” Alex says slowly.  “It just makes me tired, like all I want to do is sleep all day.  And he says that sometimes the best thing you can do is just get out of bed and take a step.”  Her voice wobbles in time with her heartbeat, and Kara pauses, waits, Alex’s wrist held softly in her hands.  “Maybe that’s what you need to do.”

“What?”

“You didn’t go to school today,” Alex says, shrugging with one shoulder.  “You only don’t go to school when you’re sadder than normal.”

“Oh,” Kara says after a moment.  

“I know it’s not the same,” Alex says with another half-shrug.  “But maybe it is, a little bit.  Just because you can’t do everything you want yet doesn’t mean it’s not enough to just get out of bed in the morning.  My doctor says everything starts with that first step and not to ignore that.”

“Oh,” Kara says again.  She bites down on the inside of her cheek and returns to wrapping the bandage around Alex’s wrist.  “Thank you,” she adds softly as she starts to run out of bandage.  Alex doesn’t say anything else, clearing her throat sharply and squinting down at her wrist as Kara fiddles with the fasteners, settling them gently on the bandage.

“See?” Alex says when Kara finishes.  “Told you so.”  She grins at Kara, wide and cocky, and bounds off the bed.  “Now come on, dinner’s ready.  Dad made pie!”  

She disappears down the stairs ahead of Kara, who follows more slowly, still apprehensive about the weight of her steps.  She dodges the creaking spot in the fourth step without thinking about it, only to pause and look back at the spot she’d just avoided, then back down to the kitchen, where Alex is sitting on the counter and stealing half-cooked spaghetti noodles from the pot so she can throw them at cabinets.  She always does when they have pasta for dinner, just because she can, even though the both of them always have to clean it up later.

It’s been 61 days and she hasn’t broken a door in 36 days and she bandaged Alex’s healing wrist without hurting her anymore and yes, now, this feels like home.

 

_only want to glean the purpose_  
 _only to scratch the surface, raise the plow_  
 _suffering whiteout conditions_  
_forget your mission, just get out somehow_


End file.
